Jennifer and Christian, two former students of mine, are getting married this summer. I can’t imagine anything better.
They were brought together and will be kept together by the love of ideas and of conversation, by the love of films and food and music and sitting at the table long after the dishes are cleared, and laughing, and everything else that makes life worthwhile. That’s what love is: the wish to go on talking.
They are young, yes, but not too young to know what they’re doing. They’ve built this relationship over years, forging it over distances and through tough times, making a home for each other in their hearts long before they decided to marry.
And besides, everyone in the world is too young to get married. Everyone is also too young to commit to a profession, too young to have children, and too young to die. Even if you’re 112, you’re too young to get married because marriage means this huge lifetime undertaking (if you’re lucky) and I cannot believe a sane person says “Okey-dokey: I will never have any other longings, desires, or frustrations because I Am Now and Forever Mature.”
Forget maturity as a synonym for stagnation: Life is about change no matter how old we are. We’re not talking only small, incidental changes here, either. Monumental changes do not stop when your kids are grown, when you hit menopause, or when you start reading the ads for Viagra very carefully. Only the astonishingly young believe, along with Hamlet, that after a certain point “The heyday in the blood is tame.” It may be a little sluggish, a little slower to rise in anger, a little thicker when it comes to family, a little thinner when it comes to insult, but “tame” is one thing blood surely does not become. Change keeps the blood moving, the heart working, the hands working; in other words, change keeps us alive.
If a person is not made from sedimentary rock, then a person will experience change. For those readers who are made from sedimentary rock, change will simply happen around you, annoying and bothering you until you decide to join in and reclaim the mess and noise of humanity.
The tricky thing is this: Changes happen for the better and for the worse. That’s where the catchy phrase in the ceremony comes from. Ringing yourselves with family, friends, comrades, and a good caterer to celebrate the declaration of your coupledom signifies your willingness to face those changes together. As good climbers advance together up unmapped stone, wholly aware of each other yet always moving separately, your journeys are linked but remain your own.
This is why people wish couples good luck at weddings.
You are promising to rely on your affection and respect for one another, promising to give the very best of what you’ve got to each other before the rest of the world gets a chance at it. It’s sort of like letting somebody in on the ground floor of a stock offering by a startup Internet company, or like getting the biggest and best chocolate chip cookie right off the baking tray before anyone else gets to choose.
Of course, giving the very best of yourself is accompanied by the unceremonious handing over of the worst of yourself. You eat the cookie, you scour the tray.
Having access to the best and the worst of your partner is still better, however, than seeing only the undifferentiated middle, the leftovers, the tired or bored or impatient self. And that worse self is all too easy to present to the person you have dinner with almost every night.
Indifference, not hate, is the destroyer of love: not bothering, not paying attention, not sharing the joke, is how to ruin a relationship. Think of the climbers: Inattention can be the start of a long fall. Strange to think that indifference can be corrosive, but indifference is like rust: gradual, natural, and — after a point — beyond repair.
Staying up to argue is preferable to silent nights spent sleeping on the far side of the bed; yelling is better than pretending something is all right when it isn’t.
Not that we wish you nights of yelling. For you there should be only cool nights in warm beds, with summer stars outside the window, with dawns worth waking to, with many cats, with days filled by your passion for life, your dedication to your work, and your love for each other.
